Everything but the Coffee (34 page)

“Coffee has always been a very unforgiving business,” Rivera explained to a reporter. For much of his life, he lugged hundred-pound burlap sacks of green coffee beans down a winding dirt road to the market. That’s where he sold his crop, usually to a middleman operating as an intermediary for the company owned by the family of that Penn student I talked with or one of the other big private interests that processed and exported Nicaraguan coffee. Often, at this point, Rivera got doubly cheated. The buyer might swindle him on the weight and then pay him half the price he would get for the coffee later in the day or the day after. Moreover, nothing came back to the community. Only in the best years—with big yields, decent prices, and a break or two at the market— would Rivera earn enough to cover what it cost to grow the crop. No matter what, he never had anything extra. His kids, as a result, left school early to work in the fields.

In 1996, after the Sandinista revolution had led to some tentative steps toward land distribution, Rivera joined PROCENCAFE, a large network of small farmers in his region of the country, which sold fair-
trade-certified coffee to U.S. and European roasters. Almost immediately, Rivera’s life improved. The co-op freed him from preying middle-men, gave him access to affordable credit, provided him with a voice in community affairs, and consistently sold his coffee for a decent price. With the added funds, Rivera bought a mule to get his coffee down the steep dirt road leading to town, patched up his roof, and purchased shoes and clothes for his children. The younger ones, then, started to attend school regularly.
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With its hardscrabble beginning and happy ending, Rivera’s tale of success and good fortune sounded like one of Starbucks’ farmers’ stories. The company, it turns out, did try to sell his story. When I was in Nicaragua, I heard from three different sources that Starbucks used a picture of Rivera in its promotional literature. But I couldn’t find that image for years. Finally, I saw Rivera’s face at a Starbucks in Norwich, England, in March 2009. The handsome farmer, his wife, and six children stared back at me from inside of one of those brochures Starbucks lines up behind its milk bar. The coffee company titled the Rivera pamphlet, copyrighted in 2005, “Starbucks and Fair Trade: Supporting a Better Life for Coffee Farmers.” Turns out, though, according to my Nicaraguan sources, Starbucks never bought more than a minuscule amount of beans, if it bought any at all, from Rivera.

Santiago Dolmus, the communications officer for CEOCAFEN, a Matagalpa-based coffee co-op, was one of the people who told me about Rivera and Starbucks. “For years,” he said, “Starbucks has come to the co-ops and said, ‘You have coffee; we want to buy it.’ But they never do it . . . it is just a show.”

“So,” I asked, “who are they getting their coffee from?”

Serious and stern-faced to that point, Dolmus smiled, as if to say, Don’t you know? I could guess, but I wanted him to make it clear.

“They aren’t buying from the co-ops,” he repeated. “They go through large intermediaries and the big farms and the medium farms.”

Mario Mejia runs Esperanza Coffee, a family-owned dry mill and export house. Most of the beans that come through his place these days
go to Starbucks. He told me the same basic story as Dolmus; he just added some numbers. According to his estimate, about 6 percent of what Starbucks buys in Nicaragua comes from small holders; the rest it gets through middlemen or directly from the owners of large and medium-sized estates, some with ties going back to the anti-Sandinista Somoza regime.

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Joaquin Solorzano plopped a bulging cardboard box down on the patio table behind the family house on San Luis Finca. “There it is,” he said, in perfect English. (He learned the language while exiled in Miami during the early years of the Sandinista revolt.) The box, he explained, contained the papers, reports, and forms he had to submit to get certified under CAFE Practices.

Pointing again to the box, Solorzano likened Starbucks to a “punishing teacher.” If you didn’t do what he said, you got in trouble. And like a student in a strict teacher’s class, you acted out of fear, not for any other reason. There was little back-and-forth in these kinds of classrooms. The teachers assumed that they knew everything. Or maybe it was that they just did what they wanted. Starbucks, he continued, issued only one-year contracts, making it hard for growers to plan and even harder to get loans at reasonable rates. But no one complained, Solorzano noted, because no one wanted to lose the business. Same with CAFE Practices. Starbucks, for example, gave growers points for growing more environmentally friendly shade coffee and then boasted about this later in the press. Farmers went along because they wanted the business, not because they bought into the program or didn’t already know about the benefits of protecting their coffee plants with canopies of leaves. They just wanted the points on the CAFE Practices test and didn’t care if Starbucks claimed credit for introducing these techniques to the region in the press back in the States.
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Solorzano speaks two languages and attended college in the United States for a couple of semesters, but still it took him almost a year to fill out all the documents and forms for the CAFE Practices application. In
order to comply with the program, he put up signs on his farm, saying that no one under fourteen could work there and that the workday would begin at 6 A.M. and end at 2 P.M. He cut back on his use of chemical fertilizers (resulting in lower yields) and took out a rather expensive loan to build a school for his workers (although he wasn’t sure he would be able to get a government-approved teacher, typically a single woman, to live on the farm alone). Starbucks didn’t pay for anything. All told, Solorzano spent more than three thousand dollars—more than double the national average family wage and surely four or five times what most coffee workers earned each year—to make these environmental and social changes. He had to pay another fifteen hundred dollars plus travel and lodging expenses to get a Starbucks-certified inspector to come to his farm and fill out his CAFE Practices scorecard. This he had to do every year. In 2006, by the way, the teacher gave his farm a 76, a solid C.

“Was it worth it?” I asked. Solorzano thought for a moment and answered like a businessman. He didn’t say anything about the environment or about social responsibility, although these things came up in our conversation later when he talked about his commitment to his workers (“They are like family,” he proclaimed) and the environment (he vowed to make sure that he did nothing to contaminate the water supply that ran through his land to the city below). “Starbucks,” he explained, “pays pretty well and buys up all the coffee for a decent price.” This last point was the key. By contrast, “you can make your farm organic, and that pays more [per pound] than Starbucks, but rarely can you sell all the coffee you grow as organic.” The same thing with fair trade, he noted.

While we walked around the farm, he showed me where most of his workers lived—the people who picked the beans on his estate and most other medium-sized and large farms in Nicaragua selling to Starbucks. Essentially migrant workers, the laborers and their families spend part of the year on the coffee farm and then return to their towns, villages, and other dots on the map for the rest of the year. They get paid only for the days they actually work, guaranteeing that just about everyone will remain in poverty.

“Where do they live?” I asked.

He pointed toward a long, skinny row of seven-foot-tall cinder blocks with eight, maybe ten, doors and seemingly no electricity or plumbing. At first, I thought they were the outhouses, but Solorzano had already showed me where the toilets were located. On this C-grade CAFE Practices farm, working people lived in what almost any Starbucks customer in the United States would call hovels—that is the only word to describe them. Three, four, and five people crammed themselves into these unlit rooms smaller than a Starbucks bathroom in Manhattan.

I knew from everything I had read that social conditions were a big part of CAFE Practices, so I asked Solorzano how things had changed for his workers since he started selling coffee to Starbucks. He pointed to the finished, but unopened, school.

What about wages? He shook his head from side to side. He told me that the government regulated them at about two dollars per day. (And again the workers don’t get paid when they don’t work, when it rains, or for the months and months between coffee harvests.) Anything else? He pointed to another small building under construction on his estate.

“What’s that?”

“A canteen,” he said.

“CAFE Practices?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” Solorzano answered. He built the kitchen because he needed to compete with other farmers to get good workers. The owners of area coffee estates, he explained, faced a shortage of experienced coffee hands. He hoped that the school would help out on that front as well. Government regulations and the lack of available labor, he argued, drove most of the far-reaching changes that businessmen were putting into place in his region of the country. Growers upgraded their estates to attract more workers. In other words, the labor market and to a lesser extent state action, not Starbucks, improved workers’ lives. But the CAFE Practices materials don’t say much about these more public dynamics.

Like Santiago Dolmus of CEOCAFEN, Solorzano also made it clear that CAFE Practices isn’t for everyone. “It’s not for the little guys,” he
declared. They just can’t afford it—can’t afford the results of lower yields because of less fertilizer, paying for auditors, or building schools. They can’t figure it out, either, he said, pointing again to the box of papers on the table.

Starbucks doesn’t market Joaquin Solorzano’s CAFE Practices story. His smooth, uncreased face, pressed khaki pants, and neat polo shirt aren’t featured in any company pictures or brochures or corpumentaries. It doesn’t package his workers’ stories, either. In Starbucks’ version of globalization, the company makes the world better for small farmers like Santiago Rivera (even though it won’t buy his beans). When Starbucks first got strong-armed by Global Exchange into purchasing fair-trade coffee, a company official told a reporter, “Fair trade gets the benefit back to the family farmer. It is consistent with our values.”
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Consumers, then, could feel better because they helped a decent, hard-working, and handsome man, who looks like Rivera, provide a better life for himself and his family.

In actuality, however, on the ground our tall cup of coffee—when it comes from Nicaragua or Rwanda or most other places—usually doesn’t come from a small holder. Instead, it might be picked by a migrant farmer and his family members for an already comfortable, well-off, perhaps politically powerful family of growers—the same kind of people who have long benefited from access to land, cheap labor, and affordable credit in the global economy. In the end, Starbucks erases its chief suppliers, as well as the lion’s share of its workforce, from its global narratives. Neither group makes for good copy, and neither group suggests much has changed in the global order—just more of the same.

STARBUCKS, THE TYPICAL: THE CASE OF ETHIOPIA

What Starbucks does—how it acts and what it says—in Rwanda and Nicaragua reveals an essential truth about the company. Sure, it isn’t some sort of monster out there trying to crush the little guy. Yet it isn’t out to help him, either—at least that’s not the first order of business.
Starbucks sells itself as a global good guy, and this, it hopes, will distinguish it from other companies and at the same time allow its customers to distinguish themselves from others. But in the end, despite all the films, press releases, and posters about helping farmers (and workers and the planet), Starbucks is no better and no worse than other companies. Starbucks is typical, even ordinary. The problem is that Starbucks isn’t a business built on selling the ordinary. At the premium end of the market, customers want not just better products but better, more compelling and valuable
stories
. While I learned about Starbucks’ ordinariness reading about Rwanda and going to Nicaragua, others learned this truth from Ethiopia.

In March 2003, Ambese Tewelde opened a coffee shop in Mekele, Ethiopia. Customers purchased four hundred cups of coffee a day from him. Tewelde called his café, with a green-and-white, rounded logo, Starbucks Coffee. This was no secret; Reuters ran a story about his business with a picture.
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Typically, Starbucks mobilized against even the slightest copyright infringement. One time it sued a woman named Sam Buck for opening a store with her name above the door.
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Another time it took legal action against a handful of Haidas, Canadian aboriginals, after they had started a business in their town of less than two thousand people called “Haidabucks.”
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But the Seattle version of Starbucks did not call in its high-priced lawyers in the Ethiopia case. It already had enough PR problems on its hands about control over words in the African nation.
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Ethiopia is generally considered the birthplace of coffee. More than a thousand years ago, the story goes, a goat farmer named Kaldi noticed his herd dancing one day after gnawing on the red berries hanging from the bushes ringing the pastures. Tired himself one day, he decided to try the stuff. He perked up and started skipping along with his goats. Soon Kaldi made the berries part of his daily diet. One day, a monk from a nearby monastery spotted the farmer dancing with his goats. He, too, wanted some of that energy, not to shimmy but to stay up and study. Soon a fellow monk came up with the idea of boiling the beans and
drinking the hot brew before lengthy religious services. News of coffee’s kick spread, and more and more monks throughout the African kingdom started drinking it to extend their devotion time.
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Ethiopians continue to grow wonderful coffees celebrated by experts for their floral aroma and soft lemony finish. These same qualities drew Starbucks—ever eager during its explosive growth period for new supply channels and products—to Ethiopia. But it came for the story as well as the beans, for what one observer called, the “clearly . . . intangible value in the specialty coffee of Ethiopia.”
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